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You know what is cooler??
You have a 1399 Authority on Technorati *drool*
This allowed me to quickly filter out all the splogs.
- Feeds with accented characters not being indexed.
- Feeds just not being indexed, even though they passed all validation tools.
- Support? Non-responsive. Not saying Google's is better or worst, as I've not had to use it, they've always indexed things just fine. So have Icerocket.
- Easy to trick in order to have the same post over and over again in the first few results on a tag search.
- Search for a term, get results in which the first entry was made 9 days ago. Click 'View all' and see posts from a few hours ago.
- Periods during which the service was 'taking a break'.
- A whole 13 hours worth of posts 'lost'.
Not saying Technorati is not an obvious reference in blog searches, and that the live search isn't better than Google's, but I wouldn't overvalue it either.
On the posts tonight that I've tested Technorati is a lot faster and more complete than Google's.
Some Examples:
Half Life 2
Facebook
Angelina Jolie
Quantum Mechanics
They all suck on Technorati
A search for "http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000501.html" only brings back two results on Google's blog search right now, while the exact same search on Technorati brings back six results.
My 2c
I was reading my feeds and the first post I read by you was the glowing one, and so missed the re-launch of Technorati which you commented on an earlier post. Thus, I put all my comments on standby, as obviously I've not had time to test it and see if the problems still exist.
The new interface is way nicer, very true, and the mini-T is also a nice addition (particularly for mobile devices).
Cheers,
As to shitty results, have you tried turning up the authority ranking? That typically matches what Google reports to me.
other terms:
Wikipedia
PopFly (this article shows on page 1 in both engines btw)
Heroes
Spaghetti
None of them generate much useful information on Technorati. I guess I could search for an URL to find 6 vs 2 results, but why? Does anyone do that? I'm no expert on "live" search, but I couldn't come up with a Technorati search that gave me anything that appeared useful on page 1.
I guess I've gotta disagree with your theory that 45 people came out of nowhere to crush Google/MS/Yahoo and generate $500m in value
[Goes to read the history books...]
Cheers,
One of the great things about indexing over 71 million blogs is that you get tons of content. Some bloggers, unsurprisingly, are more interesting than others. If you're only interested in the highly-ranked results, search with lots of authority. If you want to see all the blog posts *as they're written*, turn off authority filtering.
Either way, we hope that you'll find the new streamlined search brings you exactly what you want -- much, much faster.
And is there any reason why there is no authority filter in the main search on the homepage?
Believe me I *want* to like Technorati as even Google blog search and Sphere arent the greatest, but im just not swayed at the moment.
Of course, we all ego-search on these things - I compared '.net garbage collection barry kelly', and found my own postings in Google Blog Search, but Technorati didn't find anything even remotely related to .NET.
I ask you to try out that search for yourself - I can't see myself bothering with Technorati after my experiment.
MAJOR issue. If Google and Bloglines can work out how to filter the spam blogs, Technorati needs to solve it ASAP.
www.technorati.com looks to be a total disaster. I tried one example search - java streaming - in the "posts" section. The first two pages of results are irrelevant; half way down the second page, the results turn into porn hits that go on for another couple of pages.
s.technorati.com looks like it might possibly be better (in that it's the same as the old Technorati) except that it won't even let you access more than one page of search results now! My test search - java streaming - returns 2710 results. However, this turns into java+streaming when clicking through to the second page; there are only 13 results for that search.
Whichever way you cut it, this is a pretty low-quality update to their systems. Doesn't look like there was even rudimentary testing done...
Google blogsearch returns much better results.
Half your "authority" is splogs, all of the Technorati "100" are overcounted due to this issue.
In the past month, Technorati has missed 4 links (that I know of) that even when contacted were not corrected. I wouldn't call a search engine that bases itself on links, that can't count links accurately great. It has the potential to be great, maybe a new CEO will do that, but it's not great now.
Putting a Web 2.0 wrapper on a Web 1.0 product badly in need a complete redesign of what matters, the algorithym, does not fix anything.
BTW, I've been meaning to ask do you have options in Technorati and for that matter Wordpress/Automatic? A post like this one reminds me to ask.
As for Microsoft, there are many other blog search options to consider, if they don't know what they are, my contact info is on my blog. :)
Googles technique is non invasive. (you don't need to put anything on your page for it to work.) Google searchs for everything. Not just Blogs.
Really this post should be title. I got bored so I decided to hype a my friend's employer. Way to go!
Apparently you have forgotten how Technorati works. They don't crawl the web. It's blog engines that ping them. Meaning that bloggers INTENTIONALLY provide juice to Technorati.
Should Technorati be acquired, reasons to block those pings would immediately be justified.
Technorari core business is at the mercy of major blog engines out there.
The strange thing about the new Technorati though is that the look makes me think search is a secondary feature - the search field seems to be tucked away in a corner. Furthermore, the orange pane containing the slogan has a larger height than the green search pane. If I were a new user, I'd probably start clicking around and maybe eventually discover the wonders of search.
My other thought: funny that you suggest "small is good" - given that one of the primary critiques of 2.0 is that many startups are just "features" not businesses. IMHO you're right: features can be a successful strategy, as Technorati & Pageflakes are demonstrating.
However, the UI is pretty cluttered and unappealing.
The search on the main site works fine...
"Innovation happens elsewhere" is a quote from Bill Joy that he made after observing that there are always more smart people outside a company than inside it. It's an idea the resonates with Dave Winer's unConference idea that the smartest people are often in the audience.
Technorati is a collection of smart people that determined an opening in search and then focused on that area (blog search). Of course, a focused effort by any well funded company can create a response but hopefully, "time to market" and brand still have market effects. Wouldn't it be great to see the Technorati team profit from their efforts and NOT just see Google fix their blog search service and watch Technorati do that slow slide into irrelevance?
Innovation deserves some rewards and not just to be copied and made superflous.
I'm glad to see you trumpeting the little guy and not just asking the users of such services to be patient and expect MS or Google to fix their difficiencies.
"Innovation happens elsewhere" is the corrollary to:
"You can't hire all the really smart people" and the basic essential ingredient of successful start-ups:
"They are fueled by the intense passion of people who are risking everything to make their company successful." As a by-product they get the risk taker that gambles on their own talent to our perform the well funded, PhD driven mega-corporations. Yahoo, Google, Apple, Sun and MS had start-up phases where they exemplified these attributes. They are the model that drives the inmnovator to believe the effort is worth the price in perosnal terms... long hours, damaged relationships or no relationships outside of work.
(PS - for a start-up, being acquiured is a way to cash in but typically the end of the passion... see Blogger, Flickr, Reddit, Weblogs Inc., and others as examples. The risk takers pocket the rewards and (typically) sneak out to do it (maybe) one more time.
Like Evan, Winer, and many others.
With keyword searching I have always found Techorati to be spam-filled irrelevant, hardly worthy of the name 'search engine'...never get good results. And now it looks all horridly Web 2.0 UIified on the main page.
It picks a handful of your favorites and those are the only ones it shows:
http://technorati.com/faves/engtech
http://engtech-favs.tumblr.com/
But in the end, it didn't really seem to matter. Try searching for "french elections" in both search engines. Or one of my original searches, "Half Life 2". Multi-word searches don't really seem to work very well. Among other things, I think Google's got term proximity valuation cranked way higher, and it helps. All the articles in Google are relevant while close to none are relevant in Technorati search.
Plus, ".net" doesn't even register as a term, so I can't do my typical code-by-example searches.
Each search I've mentioned is just a random topic, not something I'd necessarily really search on, so maybe I can't judge it until I /need/ to use it. Still, the lessons that Google has learned over the years of query interpretation are very evident in their results. I truly wish you luck since another good search source is always welcome!
Whenever Google BS and Technorati's blog search are compared, the sorting order used on GBS is important. The details is *relevance*. Technorati is about *live* web. This results in different results. To compare GBS and Technorati's blog search, one needs to use "by date" sorting in GBS.
Here is a little indexing speed test from yesterday:
http://jroller.com/page/otis?entry=long_word
No problems with getting to the second page of results.
Here is an example: http://s.technorati.com/lucene?page=2
or
http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/lucene?page=2
Have you looked at http://s.technorati.com/ ?
That's pretty uncluttered and fast, no?
The number of hits on page #2 in your example does look off. Probably a bug. Will be fixed.
Good news - the page #2 problem and query encoding has already been fixed, and the fix will be pushed out later today.
You're right, switching to date order does bring GBS search relevance down, leveling the playing field. But it's nice to have the option to switch between the two, though. Especially since date-ordered searches are filled with junk.
So I must be missing the point - probably I'm just not a "live" searcher. In GBS why wouldn't I want to sort by relevance, but get results from the last day, or hour? I understand the relevance of sub-hour indexing for ego searches or perhaps breaking news, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't affect me - someone who just wants to find information relevant to a query.
Anyway, don't mean to go on and on about this. I was just curious what the hype was about. I didn't see enough improvement in search to validate Scoble's high praise. But Technorati is still a great service for what it does, and slow and steady improvement is just fine.
Good point about relevance + (recent) time slice.
Srikanth:
That's what bookmarks are for. Can you remember the simple name Simpy? Try http://www.simpy.com/ for bookmarking.
In a world of search the main thing that matters is relevance. Technorati sucks at this, they are not much better than old and dumb search engines of old: altavista, lycos, etc. Who, in their right mind, would ever bother using technorati to *find* something?
Besides, when people search for information, they truly do not care what data format that information is from (HTML/PDF/DOC/RSS). Therefore THERE AREN'T any "search niches" for companies like technorati to occupy. Well, except, maybe, for video: when people search video, they usually *want video*.
This leaves me with a question: why are they still alive? The answer IMO is simple: RSS hype. Actually, their business is built on a big lie: they used to call themselves "blog search engine", while in reality they concentrated on searching RSS feeds. And who, tell me, would ever want to search only RSS? And why?
As far as "blog searching niche" goes, guess what a blog really is? Just another HTML page, like any other. And google is still pretty good at that.
The truth is - things go wrong sometimes; what counts is how people put things right when they do. So, well done.
On my other point about Spam results - you do seem to have a problem indexing a bunch of porn-related blogs (all created by the same person/organisation and all on blogspot); these are not real blogs - they seem to simply forward to lookuplive.com
Spam is a problem for everyone. Spam is detected and killed all kinds of different ways 24/7. You'd be happy to hear that another spam handling fix on the way but, of course, the battle continues. :)
There was a problem with multiple pages of search results if using space separated search strings.
Technorati have now fixed this.
http://support.technorati.com/topic/737
I have to say - I'm pretty pleased with the response when putting something on the support forum - for a few guys they cover a lot of ground!
When a friend of mine "lost" her gmail account last month on the other hand... Let's just say support was not forthcoming... I have had no problems with gmail or any google service (testimonial in itself) but I dread the day I do!
Nice work as always.
My question is what scenario a blog-niched search engine is good for.
If I want to know how to override the Paint-event on a .NET-button, there is probably a bigger chance to find that all over the Internet (Google). If want to know the address to Robert Scoble's blog I still use Google. If I want to know what Scoble wrote today I navigate to your site or check my feeds.
What the deal is? Is it for people who want to know what the Blogosphere's last take on sliced bread is?
Thanks